Page 68 of Homecoming for Beginners

“You gonna tell Mom and Dad?”

Fuck, they’d probably be here later today. Ollie was willing to put up with their presence for Mel’s sake, and Cassie’s, but…. “Do you think I have to?”

She snorted. “It’s a small town, Ollie. You cannot hide the most scandalous relationship in Suffolk from church-lady gossip. And you know how much Mom loves gossip.”

“Not really looking forward to that conversation, especially when we’re not really talking.” He paused. “Although on the other hand, the reason we’re not really talking is they were assholes about Ty, so at least they won’t be too surprised.”

“God.” She shook her head. “You want a cupcake before the party starts?”

Did he want to slather his feelings in fat and carbs? “Absolutely.”

It wasn’t a bad way to spend a morning, or wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t had other things he desperately wanted to be doing. But then twelve thirty rolled around, the parents started arriving with their kids, and any wistful thoughts of Ty got shoved on the back burner along with things like the need to pee and conversation that went deeper than sports and the weather and whose turn was it to hit the piñata.

Ollie had just enough spare brain power to realize that he never wanted to host a party of this size without at least two other adults riding herd, and then he got swept up watching Theo and Mel plot an absolutely cutthroat strategy in capture the flag.

Maybe he should’ve tried harder to encourage ring toss instead of kids’ war games.

But everyone seemed to be having a good time, even Ollie, who eventually had to slink into the shadows next to the house and hunch there, overstimulated. He already knew he was going to crash hard again tonight. There was too much going on. He swore he’d had better stamina in the Army. But any kind of work was different from this chaos.

He was still standing against the house, eyes and ears peeled for distressed shrieking—not easy to differentiate from regular kid shrieking, so he was happy for the practice—when his parents showed up.

He caught his father’s eye, then his mother’s, but no acknowledgment passed between them. They didn’t come over to say hello, and Ollie didn’t move from the house.

“So this isn’t going to be awkward at all,” Cassie said, sidling up beside him.

“I could leave,” Ollie offered. Now that their parents had arrived, the kids would have plenty of supervision. “Come back for Theo later.”

Even as he said it, he knew he wouldn’t unless Cassie asked him to. He could just about cope with having Theo out of his sight, but only because he stayed within shouting distance.

Obviously Cassie knew better too, because she snorted. “Yeah, right. Anyway, if anyone’s leaving, it’s Mom and Dad. They didn’t blow up thirty balloons this morning.” She waited a beat. “I hope Ty appreciates your lung capacity.”

He let his head fall back against the brick. “Cass—”

“Anyway, you can’t leave now. He’ll be here any minute.”

The words washed over him like a bucket of cold water. “What?!”

She gave him a sheepish look. “In hindsight I probably should’ve just sent you to pick him up so you could have that chat away from prying eyes, but I didn’t think Mom and Dad would be showing up for another hour.”

Ollie had spent too much of his life in undesirable situations to panic now. He only wished he’d taken a little more time to think about what he wanted to say.

Shit, whatdidhe want to say? Figuring out what he wanted was easy. Deciding what to say to achieve it, not so much.

Cassie’s phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out. “Doorbell cam,” she said. “You wanna get that?”

Ollie did, in fact, want to get that.

He still hadn’t figured out what to say when he opened the door.

There was a bouquet of flowers on the other side. It had legs.

It had hands too; one of them was holding an outrageously sized gift bag stuffed to bursting with tissue paper. Presumably it also held a present. Another, smaller bag nested inside it.

Ollie remained speechless.

“Um,” said Ty’s voice from behind the flowers. “Hi? I’m… um.”

While Ollie’s brain scrambled for words, his hands went into action. He plucked the bouquet out of Ty’s hands and held it at his own side so he could see Ty’s face.

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